


(hurt people? hurt people!)

by trees_so_thin



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Angst, Chaos!Fitzroy, Friends With Benefits, bro idk it hurts people, on god idk how to tag things on here, tattoo!fitzroy, the violence isnt that much but i put it on the warnings just in case, yeah i have aus. sorry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-05
Updated: 2020-07-05
Packaged: 2021-03-04 17:41:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,185
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25080301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trees_so_thin/pseuds/trees_so_thin
Summary: fitzroy's losing his mind slowly. argo is scared of that. they kiss sometimes
Relationships: Argo Keene/Sir Fitzroy Maplecourt
Comments: 2
Kudos: 34





	(hurt people? hurt people!)

**Author's Note:**

> there's way too much to this for anyone outside of my circle in the server/tumblr to understand. im so sorry. to summarise: fitzroy's rational mind is slowly slipping away under chaos. him and argo are friends with benefits with a real clunky crush going on. fitzroy got a tattoo to match argo (roses because i draw argo with roses on his tattoo). that should be enough context. if its not im sorry. also this is just a collection of random snippets theyre not really connected but chronologically they are. have fun

1

“Just do it. Rip it out.”  
It was weird being in the back of his brain instead of the forefront, seeing things through eyes that were his but felt like someone else’s, like he was in a shell someone else was piloting—because he essentially was at this point. The voice coming out of his mouth wasn’t his- it was slower and smoother and curled at the ends. Interesting. He knew exactly what was going on but the thought process he had to go through to conceptualise it was too complicated for his brain – which felt like it was floating somewhere to the left, just out of reach- so he just left it.  
He raised his right hand, but it felt like it was moving underwater. At the same time, his muscles felt like a viscous fluid that his bones were suspended and simply rattling around in, like he had no real ability to control what they were doing. His head jerked down to look at the inside of his left wrist.  
“All you have to do is grab it and pull it out. Just like a weed in the garden.”  
The voice was bouncing around his head but he felt his lips move so it must be coming out of there, right?  
His chipped, purple painted fingernails grazed the edge of the tattoo. In a sudden clear moment, he managed to pull his hand into a fist and prevent himself from starting to do damage.  
“No, don’t- you can’t make m-“  
His voice warped and changed as he spoke, cracking and bending like a melted record, and the sentence changed into “- say goodbye.”

A flash of heat and then a dull, searing pain as the limits in his brain broke and he ripped effortlessly through the flesh of his wrist with his own fingers, breaking the image of a blue rose clean in two.  
Then three.  
Then four.  
Then the room went white.

“Good job,” they whispered through his lips.  
When he came to on the floor, covered in spots of his own blood and ink, strands of hair floating away from him, kitchen tiles stained, he no longer felt separate from himself.  
Or separate from them.

Or close to him.  
He was free.

2.

Argo found Fitzroy on the floor.

Not that this was an uncommon occurrence; Fitzroy was always sitting around doing stupid yoga poses and whatnot (“It keeps me limber!”), but this time something was different. Something was off.  
“Hey, buddy, are ya doing okay?” Argo asked tentatively as he crouched down next to the half-elf’s almost comatose body laying spread-eagled on the bare floorboards.

Argo reached out a hand to touch Fitzroy and was shocked at how cold to the touch his body was- an odd sensation considering he usually ran at a very hot ambient temperature. In the same instant, Argo noticed how shallow his breathing was.  
He panicked a little.

“Hey…Fitz.. wake up.” He rolled the other man’s muscular body over so he was facing the other way and not restricting his airway.  
The first thing he saw was the white.  
Not just of his rapidly thinning hair, which had been receding and lightening for months now at an oddly strange rate, and not the white of his skin, losing its tan in the winter months and copious amounts of home time (odd for Fitzroy, but Argo had never really questioned it). No. Not that. The white of his wide-open eyes.

The shock of the colour’s pureness sent an unsettling pang through Argo’s chest. He wasn’t exactly sure what he was meant to feel looking at them, but he could decipher one thing.  
He was scared.  
Fitzroy stared blankly up at the ceiling, his deep black pupils all but obliterated by the glow of their surrounding whiteness. Argo couldn’t tell if he was conscious or not, but he wasn’t blinking and his limbs were stiff as a board (--rigor mortis, his brain flashed worryingly, before he found Fitzroy’s pulse) so he assumed Fitzroy was in some sort of sleep zone or dream state, before he felt Fitzroy’s hand twitch.

In an instant Argo felt himself propelled across the dorm room so fast that he couldn’t even process it until after it happened. One minute he was kneeling in the middle of the room, the next winded and smashed up against the far wall and definitely with a rib or two out of place.  
“WHAT do you think you’re doing, _Argonaut?"_ Fitzroy demanded, swiftly pulling himself up into a somehow towering presence and stalking over to where Argo had been magically thrown. The tone and inflection of his voice made Argo flinch like he’d just been cut- especially the full form of his first name.

Fitzroy never calls him that.

“I- I was just- you were laying dead-like on the floor- I just wanted t’make sure you were okay!” he pleaded, scrambling back to brace himself more against the wall and wincing when his ribs crunched. Fitzroy stopped his slow walk and loomed over him, planting one hand on the wall for stability as he looked down at Argo.

Argo noticed the cracks in his skin.

Spiralling and trailing down his arms across every muscle and tendon, trailing up his face like an old porcelain doll, all culminating in a large, raw patch on the right side of his face, which was also peppered with holes like from buckshot; the delicate tendrils let layers of iridescent, pearl like colour through. And it was glowing.  
So were his pure white eyes.

“F..Fitzroy..”  
“ _Sir_ Fitzroy,” he intoned, gently picking up Argo’s chin with the tips of his fingers and tilting his face towards him, “and you will address him as such.”

The voice coming out of Fitzroy’s mouth made Argo’s skin crawl. The slickness, the flat inflection, the almost sensual undertone mixed with the forceful power behind it- it was nothing like the spoilt, whiny affectation he normally put on. This voice was so detached from Fitzroy’s face that Argo almost started seeing double.  
That, of course was still neglecting to mention his word choice just then.  
“W-wait. Hold on a second,” Argo struggled to speak through his craned neck, locking eyes with Fitzroy and then wishing he didn’t, the brightness of the glow burning into his retinas. “ _Him?_ Address _HIM_ as such? What are- what are you trying to say here, Fitz, that- th- who are you?” Argo felt the grip on his chin tighten and watched Fitzroy stiffen.  
“Me? I’m…..Fitzroy,” Fitzroy said slowly, as if he was thinking it over. The sound of the name fell dull on his lips, like he wasn’t used to using it to speak about himself. “Yes… Fitzroy.. Maplecourt. I’m him.”  
Every pass Fitzroy made at saying his own name made Argo more uneasy than the last. Fitzroy’s pronunciation of his name was so dull and lifeless, like he was describing a one note character in an epic novel, rather than himself. Argo was pretty sure his heart rate was over the unhealthy range and into the near-death range instead- but how was he supposed to know that?  
“Uh….ok well, F-Fitzroy, uh. You don’t seem like you’re doing real good right now, and I. Just wanted to, uh-”  
“Not doing good? I beg to differ. I’m doing brilliant.”  
Fitzroy cracked the widest, most crooked smile Argo had ever seen, and the light from his eyes and skin glared off his pointed canines.  
This wasn’t Fitzroy.

Argo had known it almost since before he had got thrown across the room but it still felt like a cold rock had dropped in his gut to acknowledge that the handsome, deranged man standing over him wasn’t, in fact, the same person he’d found lying face down on the floor ten minutes ago. Argo had no idea where Fitzroy’s presence had gone or why, and he couldn’t see even a trace of him in those cold eyes.  
He was sitting in the shadow of a stranger.

A dangerous stranger.

3

“Give me your cloak.”  
“What?”  
Fitzroy turned around to look at Argo, fully expecting to be greeted with a joking grin, but Argo’s face was completely serious.  
“I said give me your cloak.”  
“What? Why?” Fitzroy pulled the collar of the garment closer around his face and whisked the edge of it away from argo’s reaching fingers. “You can't just have it, I'm wearing it.”   
Argo sighed and put a hand to his forehead. “That's the problem, you're always wearing it. It's full of tatters and holes! If you give it to me I can fix it up and make it nice again, fancy lad.”  
Fitzroy considered this for a second. Ok , maybe he did wear it constantly, but it was out of necessity, not aesthetics, at this point. And it wasnt that full of holes, it was only a little shredded up.  
“Look, I can't just- I can't just not have it, Argo. I have to.. Uh.. cover. yknow. My face up.”  
“You do know that it doesn't completely hide it, right? Like y’can't just……. It's pretty obvious still whether you're hiding it with your collar or not.”  
“Yes, I KNOW but it at least affords me some sense of security, Argo, okay?” He cringed at himself, not used to verbally justifying his actions in that sort of way.  
A chill wind blew across the school grounds, and Fitzroy felt every shred of that cold air thread through the cracks in his skin and through his body. It stung, but wasn't necessarily unpleasant. It was unsettling how …. hollow his body felt.

He had felt like he was living in a shell for a while now, ever since that first time chaos had made him lose control completely. He didn't want to think about the things he had seen himself do, but they were vile enough for him to feel like he was no longer fully attached to the inside of his body. Hence the shell.  
The cracks only served to remind him of how fragile his grip on himself was, and the massive hole in his cheek revealing not flesh but a shifting pearlescent substance was like a gut punch everytime he saw it. It showed him the wrong side of himself.  
Fitz had not looked in a mirror for a while.   
And he didn't want anyone else to have to see that person either.  
But the patch kept spreading, to the point that it had obliterated his whole right cheek and had crawled up to his temple. The collar of the cloak hid most of it, and his lengthening hair (that he was too scared to trim due to how brittle and easily shedding it had become) helped somewhat to cover the patch at the temple, but he dreaded what people would think if it grew more.

“And anyway,” he continued, snapping out of his sudden introspection, “I don't really care if it doesn't look nice. It doesn't really matter anymore.” Fitzroy paused. “The cloak, I mean.”   
The two of them continued the slow walk they had been taking towards their room after the day's classes, in silence until they reached the door. At this point, Argo turned back to Fitzroy before he could grab the doorhandle and hide away again.  
“Look, are you d- no, wait. That doesn't work. Okay. you're obviously not doing okay, Fitzroy. Let me help. Stop running away from assistance. Y’can’t- you can't just take everything on yourself.”  
Fitzroy frowned and let himself in anyway, refusing to look at Argo even as the other man followed closely behind him. “I’m fine, Argo. I've taken everything else in my life on by myself and I'll deal with this on my own too.”   
Argo quickly managed to corner Fitzroy in the doorway of his personal bedroom, backing him up against the doorframe and grabbing his hands to prevent the half elf from going anywhere. Fitzroy flinched to feel Argo’s cool fingertips on the destroyed skin of his hands.  
“No,” Argo said, his tone gentle but threatening. “Look, I may not have any idea what's really going on in there but y’seem distressed enough even just about the skin stuff that I can only assume somethings going on in that brain of yours too. And I can see you're struggling with it. I.. I want to help you.”   
Argo neglected to mention the time the other week when Fitzroy had seemingly telekinetically thrown him across the room and then spoken like he was another person, but he assumed that whatever that was was a part of whatever was eating Fitzroy up.   
He wasn't going to think about how scared that encounter made him.

“Well, Argo, that’s.. Very kind, but I can't let you do that, I… I don't know how you can help or if it's...even possible.”   
Fitzroy trembled as he spoke, feeling his vocal cords twist and fighting to try and keep his normal voice coming out of his mouth. He could feel the Chaos side of himself struggling to let his rational mind free most of the time, but right now it was even more active than usual, wriggling disgustingly through him, even tainting the small warmth in his stomach at having Argo hold his hands so closely and turning it into a pit of anxiety instead.   
_I don't want to touch him what if I hurt him-_

Apparently disregarding Fitzroy's thoughts (rude! It's almost as if he can't hear every single one), Argo gently let go of Fitzroy’s hands to cradle his face, carefully avoiding the large raw patch of eroded skin, and leant in to slowly kiss him on the lips.   
For a second, everything in Fitzroy's brain went blank, and he was the most present he’d ever been in his own body since the start of this whole situation. It wasn't the fact that Argo kissed him- that was normal enough between them ( _just as friends_ , he thought)- but rather the long, gentle nature of it, like Argo was trying to say something comforting without words. Fitzroy closed his eyes for a moment, but that was his undoing.  
His blank mind snapped suddenly, and the last sane shred of his brain went sailing into the distance of his mental hallway. He almost felt the crunch of it hitting the imaginary wall. Dimly, his right mind watched from the end of that hallway, almost in third person, as his body roughly grabbed the back of Argo’s head and kissed him back.   
Argo let out a surprised moan, but didnt pull away, stepping a little closer to Fitzroy and linking his fingers around the back of Fitzroy’s head. Fitzroy watched this with a mild, detached horror, now feeling more like he was slightly overlaid on top of his body rather than in it, but still viewing himself from the outside. 

_That's not me- that's not the right me- don’t I don’t want him to know about them wait-_

“Fitz-” Argo managed to whisper in between small breaks for air, “wait- you’re-”  
“I’m…?”  
That disgusting, skin crawling voice again. Their voice. All curly and slithering. Nothing like his own.  
Argo twitched at the sound and instantly realised something had gone wrong. His mind ran through all the possible courses of action he could take, knowing how badly his last encounter with this presence had gone (one of his ribs still hadn't popped back into place).   
“What am I, Argonaut?”  
Argo violently jerked back from their grasp but kept his grip on the back of their head, not wanting them to have too much freedom of movement.   
“Okay, uh…. Fitz, you’re in there somewhere, I can see it, just- just- somehow let me know how I can get you back in, boy.”

“I’m trying,” Fitzroy tried to say, but he couldn't tell whether he managed to make it come out of their mouth or not. He didn't think he had the ability to gain back any modicum of control anymore. He felt like a ghost standing outside himself, not being able to feel even the largest of bones within him, not being able to feel any sensation from his back up against the doorframe, not being able to feel Argo’s hands.  
He couldn't even feel any emotions, just a dull throb in his ethereal chest that betrayed no greater meaning. 

Seeing no response from Fitzroy’s body, Argo instead released one hand from the back of his head and quickly slapped Fitzroy across the face.  
The sound rang out in the empty dorm room then stopped dead.   
They grinned, wide and sharp and long, Fitzroy’s face flecked with blood from the skin that had broken under the slap.

And Fitzroy felt it drip down his cheek.

“--oh,” he gasped, wiping the blood away and staring down at his fingers, still not quite able to feel perfectly in sync with his body but- thank god, at least- somehow back inside it. “Oh, thank god.”   
Feeling all the tension leave his body in a rush, his knees buckled and he slid down the doorframe into a heap. Fitzroy wrapped his arms around Argo's leg and rested his head on them, feeling tears start to stream down his face.   
“Fitz? Is that… is that you?” Argo asked tentatively, crouching down to Fitzroy’s level as best he could with his leg still wrapped in a vice grip. “I’m sorry for slapping ya, it just felt like.. The best course of action to take, I couldn't…”  
“It’s okay,” Fitzroy said slowly, testing out his voice, making sure it was normal. “Thank you. That was scary.”   
“Do you...want to tell me what’s going on in there, or….I mean, just so I know for next time, and I can do something about it, or, like, help, I don't know…”  
Fitzroy shook his head in distress. “NO, I can't.. I don’t know what to- I don't want you to know.”  
Argo deflated a little, hurt by the lack of trust in him Fitzroy seemingly had- nothing unusual, but it still stung everytime he was reminded of it. He was sure that if Fitz just confided in him even a little it would be easier for him to protect him, not even just as a sidekick but in situations like this, as a friend. (Just a friend).

“Alright then,” he mused, softly and regretfully touching the new crack in the skin on Fitzroy’s cheek that had split under the slap, then reaching down to unpin the brooch holding his cloak together. “But you're still going to give me your cloak so I can fix it.”   
Fitzroy didn't make a move to prevent Argo from lifting the weight of the cloak off his shoulders and setting it aside, nor did he move when Argo brushed his hair out of his face and took his glasses off for him.   
“It’ll be okay, boyo.”  
Argo wrapped Fitzroy in a warm, firm hug, and held him there for so long that Fitzroy almost fell asleep.  
A small smile spread across his face.  
It was just a little too wide.


End file.
